Founder of Fuel Accountants and The AI Accountant. With over 15 years in practice management and technology consulting for accounting firms, Peter is passionate about helping accountants embrace AI to transform their businesses.
42 articles
A staff member built a brilliant practice management dashboard with AI. One problem — the data that would make it work lives in three systems that don't talk to each other. That gap between vision and architecture is the same gap every CAS practice is hitting. The fix isn't more training. It's building artifacts that prove your team can do the work.
During a webinar on AI-powered client coaching, a colleague shared a 25-question diagnostic survey in Excel. It was ugly, had scoring errors, and looked like what it was — a spreadsheet pretending to be a tool. Thirty seconds of prompting later, it was a polished interactive HTML page that captured, scored, and analysed responses. The quality ceiling on what you hand your clients just disappeared.
I built an AI skill for something completely unrelated to accounting — booking flights — and learned more about context engineering in two hours than months of client work had taught me. The first draft captured my obvious preferences. The corrections surfaced knowledge I didn't know I had. That's the encoding gap, and it's the reason most firms' AI stays mediocre.
PwC launched a subscription AI platform that lets clients access tax, financial analysis, and due diligence intelligence — without the hourly bill. When the largest firm in the profession stops selling hours, every firm below them inherits the pricing question. The answer isn't panic. It's building.
The KPIs that built successful accounting firms — utilization, AHR, profit per partner — were designed for a world where humans do all the work. When AI becomes a production participant, those metrics aren't wrong. They're just no longer enough. Here are three metrics I think matter now — and I want you to challenge me on every one of them.
AI compressed the cost of solo founding a CAS practice to near zero. Your best people know this. The question isn't how to prevent departures — it's whether your firm offers something a solo practitioner can't replicate. Four things make the difference, and all of them are buildable.
Your review queue doesn't distinguish between files that need your judgment and files that are clean. So you review everything — and become the bottleneck. The fix isn't better delegation. It's building systems that tell you where your attention actually matters, so you can stop being the dragnet and start being the editor.
A Harvard study found individuals with AI were 3x more likely to produce top-10% ideas — not because of tool skills, but because AI gave them the confidence to act on their instincts. Your team has the same instincts. The question is whether your firm builds the conditions where confidence follows — or watches your best people build it somewhere else.
Anthropic surveyed 80,508 AI users. The number one fear isn't job loss — it's unreliability. AI fails the same way your staff does. The difference: corrections become permanent rules.
Intuit and Anthropic announced a multi-year partnership putting QuickBooks inside Claude. The MCP server is already public on GitHub — a developer expanded it to 143 tools. But the depth question that's limited every platform integration still applies, and the Enterprise Suite demo isn't what your QBO clients will get.
Intuit just connected QuickBooks directly to Claude — your clients can now build AI agents with their own financial data, no accountant required. Plus every AI company is converging into every other AI company, Jeff Bezos is raising $100 billion to rebuild manufacturing with AI, and 81,000 Claude users just confirmed what we published on Wednesday.
98% of accounting firms use AI. Only 21% have a policy governing it. Your staff is already putting client data into tools you haven't vetted — and the line between safe and dangerous isn't where most practice owners think it is. Here's what's actually risky, what's safe right now, and the one thing you should implement this week.